Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Winning isn't enough!

Barack Obama is going to win. Of that, I have no doubt. What eats at me though is that I don’t want him to just win. I want him to kick some serious butt. I want this election to be a blowout like no one has ever seen. A Democratic tsunami that sweeps every Democrat within five points of polling margin to victory. That’s a hard thing to set one’s hopes for, but I can’t help it. Every state that Obama does not win is going to eat at me. Every Democrat that falls short is going to sting for me. This is a no-brainer election year for me. The Republicans have royally screwed up the country to an incredible degree. And it is not just the incompentence of George W. Bush that is to blame, it is the Republican policies that he faithfully put into place and which John McCain is sworn to continue that have screwed things up for us.The Republicans need a come-to-Jesus thrashing this election or they are never going to change and they will just continue down this path until it totally destroys this country as we know it.My favorite Express-News columnist Jonathan Gurwitz had a piece on Saturday about A Conservative Reckoning in which he speculates on what went wrong for Republicans this election (he assumes McCain will lose big). Gurwitz’ problem is that he believes the only thing Republicans did wrong in office was to spend too much money (although he doesn’t think spending on Iraq is the problem) and allowed themselves to be corrupted by Washington lobbyists.So if Obama wins, but not by a whopping margin, then people like Gurwitz will take solace that their ideas are still good and that it was just some character deficiences among some incumbent Republicans that made them lose this time around. They will advocate for redoubling efforts to push for the same economic and international policies that have been tearing the country apart and in four years they might be back stronger than ever.I want to see them smashed now. I don’t want my country to have to go through even more economic misery and international crisis before people realize that the policies are wrong and not just the people.